Today we are excited to share the preview for account failover for customers with geo-redundant storage (GRS) enabled storage accounts. Customers using GRS or RA-GRS accounts can take advantage of this functionality to control when to failover from the primary region to the secondary region for their storage accounts.

We are excited to reveal a set of new features for backing up Microsoft Azure file shares natively using Azure Backup. All backup-related features have also been released to support file shares connected to Azure File Sync.

We are excited to announce that this week we have made Advanced Threat Protection available for public preview on Azure Storage Blob service. Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage detects anomalous activities indicating unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit storage accounts.

Azure Blob storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob Storage is ideal for storing, images, documents and other file types for distributed access. Read this Introduction to object storage in Azure to learn more about how it can be used in a wide variety of scenarios.